Within-time-ness and history.pdf - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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precedes Platonism. What could be more appropriate for the new museum than to try to use the aesthetic strategies of the original? In the next section we will attempt to imagine Pheidias and Iktinos and the likes of Mnesicles engaging with the old acropolis in pre-Platonic aesthetic terms. Truth and the Parthenon The science of history, Heidegger writes, is to put present-day Dasein into touch with the Dasein which has-been-there. xi Going back into the past does not first get its start from the acquisition, sifting and securing of historical material. Rather these activities presuppose an interest in the having-oncebeen-there of an historical Dasein. Some technités in the past was motivated by architecture but differently than is the case today. In our experiment with Heidegger’s approach to the historical imagination, we ask, what may have been the “moment of vision” of the likes of Iktinos and Pheidias? What was it about the classical Parthenon that got the architects and sculptors excited within-their-own-time, what would have been the focus of their technical care? In this section I will argue that Heidegger’s criterion for truth as alétheia more accurately reflects the actual concerns of the classical technitai than some other approaches to Parthenon studies. It is not likely, for example, that the classical architects viewed the Parthenon with the same kind of concerns that Richard Etlin identifies among architects in the modern era. Etlin claims that the Parthenon has “towered over” the artistic imagination of the Western world since the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, and that for the likes of Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, “L’idée de Dorique” has meant appreciating the Parthenon for the way that … the very Athenian sunlight seems to unify the columns of the Parthenon to complement the living aspect conveyed through tapering shaft, swelling entasis, and fluid fluting. xii Etlin notes how a modern concern with the sublime effected an imaginative trans-materialisation of the Parthenon from stone into metal. Emile Burnouf remarked in 1847 that the oblique rays of the setting sun caused the Parthenon to “shine like glowing metal”, and in 1925 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret compared the Parthenon at midday to “newly cast bronze.” Le Corbusier also, famously, compared it to a motorcar. “This harmonious ensemble of site and architecture,” Etlin writes, “is like a demonstration of 9
Socratic thought.” xiii Yet Socrates himself specifically discussed the beauty of the Parthenon from the inside rather than the outside of the architecture. In Hippias Major, Plato describes a debate regarding the nature of beauty, kalos, in which Socrates is portrayed citing Pheidias’s chryselephantine sculpture of the goddess inside the eastern naos of the Parthenon. Socrates admitted that the sculpture was beautiful, but not because it was made out of gold. Pheidias didn’t make Athena’s eyes out of gold, nor her face, feet and hands. He made them from ivory. For the pupils he used xiv precious stones. Pausanias too hardly seems to have noticed the Parthenon “from the outside”, instead he made a beeline for the eastern cella where again he commented on Pheidias’s master-work, the size and materiality and the symbolism of the xv statue of Athena. Lothar Haselberger argues that Iktinos and his architect friends would not have been so excited either about the curvature and other so-called “refinements” of the Parthenon. And again Haselberger draws attention instead to the experimental novelty of the interior architecture. He writes, … the design of the Parthenon has no exceptional use of curvature and other refinements. The ongoing investigation of the Parthenon and continued addition of comparative material may well change this heretical conclusion, but what emerges at present is that the architectural and historic merits of this building are not dependent on its strategies of ‘adding and subtracting.’ Although an extraordinarily high level was reached in this and signs of experimentation can be discerned, these are minor and subdued compared to other aspects of the structure. A much more significant experimentation – long recognised by Gottfried Gruben – is obvious in the novel, pi-shaped column arrangement that dramatically widens the cella space. xvi The Parthenon architects were already well versed in “additions and subtractions”. They didn’t develop these techniques by themselves. Vitruvius (7.pr.12) records that Iktinos and Karpion wrote a treatise about the symmetriai of the Parthenon, noting that judgement, sensitivity and a “flexible mind” are most helpful, whilst exaggerations and “improbities” are not acceptable. But Haselberger makes the point that none of these so-called “refinements” (so far 10
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